Pulci, Luigi

Pulci, Luigi

(lwē`jē po͞ol`chē), 1432–84, Italian poet. Of an impoverished literary family, he became a protégé of Lorenzo de' Medici and a friend of Poliziano. The most noted work of his large literary production is Morgante Maggiore (1483). A hodgepodge of comic incidents, scientific digressions, and lofty passages, it recounts the adventures of Orlando and the giant Morgante in the land of the infidel. The first canto was translated (1822) by Byron.

Bibliography

See L. Hunt, Stories from the Italian Poets (4 vol., 1846–54).

Pulci, Luigi

Born Aug. 15, 1432, in Florence; died early November 1484, in Padua. Italian poet. Representative of the most democratic current in 15th-century humanism; materialist and skeptic. Declared a heretic by the church.

Pulci’s chief work is the epic poem Morgante. Its first edition, published between 1478 and 1480, contained 23 cantos; the second, with 28 cantos, is known as the Morgante Maggiore (1482). The work is based on a 14th-century folk narrative poem that recounts the adventures of the knight Orlando (Roland) and his squire, the good-natured giant Morgante. Comedy and buffoonery alternate with naive, impassioned folk elements. Morgante influenced the work of F. Rabelais, as well as the heroicomic narrative poems of the Renaissance.

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